winter # 10

Winter is for

Cold toes and soft sunlight

For sunflowers

And Dyson blues

Desire is a stray bird

Desire is a stray bird
with ragged plumage
proud
but dirty and desperate
desire is a winged scavenger

Winter # 9

Winter is for

For a man with armfuls of tattoos and a ginger beard

On a freo sidewalk

Talking about birds and fruits

And potential permanency

Winter is for familiar barristers in forest green

For sitting on Gemma’s front steps overlooking the jacaranda tree

With green tea in mugs blue eyes blue and sunflower yellow

Synaesthesia of the Sky

Every morning as I drive to work, the sky puts on a different show for me. Often I feel really compelled of a moment to record the words that present themselves to my brain. It is quite a persistent demand, and I know I cant rest until I articulate it. it is tricky when I am driving, but I grab anything I can find to write on. I have endless receipts, and scraps of paper that I had found, and scribbled on the back of, in glorious desperation to make some tangible vestige, of a 'buzzing mind drifting to peace' moment. Once I couldnt find any paper so I wrote a poem on my leg.

I think the sky puts on such a calm and quiet show, most people dont notice it. But how could it be quiet? How could such an audacious display be calm? Maybe it rages with delight, but we just cant hear it with our ears. Maybe we are using the wrong body part for the wrong function. I wish I could hear with my eyes.

I wonder about ... the sound of sights.

I heard something about synaesthesia. How famous composers who saw different chords as certain colours. One composer thought, when he was young, that they dimmed the lights in orchestra theatres so that the audience could see the colour show in front of their eyes more clearly when the music was playing. he didnt realise it was only him who could see it.

When I spend time in the south with my grandparents, I run along the river every night at 5 pm as the sun started to set. The Eaton River is one of my favourite places. It is a rich and golden wealth of so many positive and beautiful memories. but even without that, it is pure and base aesthetic pleasure. The whole riverside comes alive at 5 pm, and in a different way every evening. Each day there is a different kind of sunset, a different kind of sky laced with different kind of light, and different colours, shades, dimensions. I felt like one evening the trees had a whole new shape and dimension to them, because of the way the sun was flickering through the sporadic gaps of sky. bark-sky-bark-sky-river-sky-light-light-light. 

Another evening, a few years ago, I remember feeling, with the full force of my mind and body, that the riverside was on fire around me. there is a row of rich red trees with bleeding glistening sap, that have that burnt black bark, that blisters and crumbles, and the rich red flecks through the charcoal black. the sun had reached a certain point of its trajectory and it flickered through the trees so fast, like the turning of an old movie reel, and, for me, the riverside was in flames.

One evening, as I was running in one direction the sky was gold, yellow gold like straw. Liquid buttery gold. And it reflected onto the river so the river was golden too. And then I turned around to run in the other direction and the sky on this side was pink. What a show, I thought. It was like the sky had two different sunsets for just one riverside. It was so audacious. Maybe it was quietly raging with delight but I just couldn't hear it.

As the sunset dissipated, the sky turned grey blue. Darkness was creeping in around me, and there was that element... there was that purple, to the air around me, that was the gathering dark. Is darkness just the absence of light? how can it be when I can see a physical purple all around me? I can almost touch it.

Earlier that evening, the sky had been reflected so perfectly onto the river, and I could see clouds in the water. I almost couldnt tell the difference between water and sky. was the river in the sky or the sky in the river? was I just standing on my head? I couldnt figure it out. It was beautiful confusion that I felt in my whole body. It was like the elements were sharing with eachother, air and water. up and down. It was like it was all around me. and it was.

I wrote this based on conversations with my friends Gemma and Maevana

Project Number One!

Do A Poetry Reading!

Yesterday I went to The Moon where they hold the Perth Poetry Club each week. I have been receiving emails from these people for months and months, but was too daunted, or maybe too disorganised to get there. One time I was even in the city on a Saturday and brought some poems just in case I mustered up the courage to pop in, but instead I met a friend. Something about the spirit that I am in lately, where things just seem less daunting, where most change feels positive and encouraged and positive change is so much more accessible. My mind feels a lot clearer, and is seeking more clarity still. It is good.
So yesterday I just popped down there, it was held in the back room of the Moon, and there was such a motley crowd. It was strange, and it was sweet, and I really enjoyed that. For some reason I envisaged something youthful and pretentious. This suited me much better, and totally assuaged my nerves. As strange as some of the people were, this was about expression.
The first person to get up and speak was a very old, hunched woman in a red matching tracksuit. She spoke about coming home after a holiday. There was a very large man with long hair and a beard wearing a garish hawaiin shirt who's poems were replete with 'fucks', but still, quite intelligently expressed. There was a European woman who kept forgetting the words to her slam poem, an asian girl in a doctor who jumper who spoke effusively about Vincent Van Gough, a few sensible looking men in sensible pants and sensible shoes who got up and did slam poetry that I did not expect, or beautiful poetry that I did not expect. There was a short bald man with glasses who walked through the audience loudly proclaiming his rhythmic poem, I think that was my favourite moment. Or maybe it was the new guy who wrote a rhyming poem about a lonely man in outback australia who built a tin effegy of a woman and got spade, and tetnis from his rusted steel companion. The two special guests were an interesting dichotomy. An older woman who had an interesting selection of poems, all of different forms, and she would tell us before she read them, a lot of them I had never heard of before which inspired me to do some research about form. (Mark Treddenick had planted that seed a few months ago, about the importance of form in poetry). And the other guest was a man in a hat and sunglasses who's sonnets were called 'death and vaginas' - about creation and voids. He also did a lot of rhythmic poetry which was interesting. I decided at half time that I would get up and do one. Sophie had just gone to a sketching course, and Sarah said 'Its the day for doing new things'. I had brought my books along just in case, so I was prepared. I decided to read Alpheuis and Arethusa, one of my greek mythology series.
I was hardly nervous. It did not feel like such a big deal. Not in the sense that I was unaffected or indifferent. not at all, it just felt right. It felt good. It felt natural. I did not feel the need for any grand expression of nerves or delight or accomplishment or breaking down of fear barriers. Even though I felt all of those things somewhere inside my brain. I think what dominated my mental landscape at the time though, making all those other thoughts quietly diminish, was a calm sense that this was good and this was right. I felt calmly thrilled, calmly confident, calmly like I was born to do this, to get up and share stories that I had crafted with my words.

red nose

I have never seen something so sexy
as blood rushing to the surface of soft skin
as her cheeks flushed from walking
and her nose, red from the cold morning air

Projects (To Do Before I Leave Next Year)

1) Keep a project diary and record this list in an interesting way

2) Buy Gum Boots

3) Go for a walk every day for 2 weeks, once in the rain (find different ways to document the walk)

4) Have a dinner party

5) Make a cross stitch

6) Bake 6 different loaves of bread

7) Take a photo portrait of each member of my family

8) Be a vegan for 2 weeks

9) Have a craft club, even if it is only once

10) Write a sonnet

11) Have a tea party picnic

12) Listen my way through Oumie and Oupa's massive classical music record collection

13) Paint - something of my own and something imitating or replicating an artist I like

14) Record my favourite objects in an interesting way

15) Wake up earlier than usual every morning for two weeks and write

16) Get people to make me mix CDs

17) Go to Pemberton and write poems about trees

18) Do a Poetry reading

19) Learn a song on guitar or banjo and do an open mic

20) Do a dance course - african, tap or swing

21) Buy red lipstick and red nailpolish and wear it, out

22) Try as many different national foods as I can

23) Have 24 hours without screen technology

24) Play the minimalism game for one month

25) Do something amazing with a stranger

sunrise

and then, to my left
smoking, blistering peaches
smeared across the charcoal sky

Michael and me

they owned golden dogs
and they ate golden syrup
they had golden hearts
and golden hair

sunrise

Distracted strokes of soft pink

Like misplaced socks

Scattered across the sky